Opera Holland Park serves up the most memorable of recent Rigolettos
The only thing that might be said to have been traditional about Opera Holland Park’s strong opening night of the season was the bone-chilling weather, but if nothing else it supplied verisimilitude in a new production of Rigoletto translating the setting from northern Italy to England. Cecilia Stinton’s ingenious staging moves the action of Verdi’s opera to an Oxbridge college, and already during the prelude we witness an unpleasant bit of Bullingdon Club-style initiation.
In Neil Irish’s designs, the stage is dominated by dark-panelled bookshelves filled not only with fine bindings but sporting cups and trophies. Rowing oars, cricket whites and flappers’ dresses complete an interwar scene that also has more recent resonance, and for once even the theatre’s backdrop of Holland House looks just right, evoking a college façade.
Stinton’s imaginative stagecraft makes ingenious connections, not least when the offstage band in the first scene is replaced by the sound of a crackly 78-rpm record playing jazzed-up Verdi. A clever device budget-wise, too, it may have added to the slight choppiness of the opening ensemble, but the conductor Lee Reynolds soon got things under control in a performance bristling with dramatic tension. With the City of London Sinfonia and Opera Holland Park Chorus on fine form, this score’s unique “tinta” is unmistakeable; Reynolds ensures that the music’s Mediterranean passion is never suffocated by the stuffy milieu portrayed on stage, however far apart these two strands may seem.
It’s not always easy to convincingly update the opera’s setting at the 16th-century court of the womanising Duke of Mantua, where the hunchbacked jester Rigoletto is trying to protect his beloved only daughter Gilda. Stinton succeeds especially cleverly with Rigoletto, here perhaps the college porter, making his disability an old-fashioned prosthetic leg (his medals suggesting a war injury). The baritone Stephen Gadd gives a compelling performance and is sympathetic in all the character’s conflicting emotions, though on Tuesday night by the time he reached Act II’s climactic “Cortigiani” (surtitled as “You elites are a vile breed”) he sounded vocally indisposed.
But who, in this pre-#MeToo setting, is the Duke? The master of the college? His disguise as the poor student Gualtier Maldé works neatly in this context, though little sense of character is established by Alessandro Scotto di Luzio, a dull-toned tenor with intonation problems and some painful top notes. By contrast, Alison Langer’s Gilda delivers a better “Caro nome” than often heard at many grander operatic addresses. Singing with glinting tone, she’s no innocent, and it’s clear from her first appearance that she has been out enjoying student life.
Simon Wilding’s Sparafucile has dark, sculpted tone to match his sideline as the hired assassin, but the pub where we encounter him working in Act III is not really dingey enough (and far too bookish, even by Oxbridge standards) for the goings on, despite Jake Wiltshire’s atmospheric lighting. Hannah Pedley sings warmly as Maddalena, and such smaller roles as Giovanna (Georgia Mae Bishiop), Monterone (Matthew Stiff) and Marullo (Jacob Phillips) are excellently filled in an evening that adds up to the most memorable of recent Rigolettos.
Until June 4; operahollandpark.com
